It is genuinely ridiculous how much content there is in this game for the price. Like, a lot of it looks like an excuse to play the same levels a dozen times with minor variations, but then there are tons of levels, lots of events, ongoing updates with new content of all types, so many different towers and upgrades to play with, community maps to add even more variety… It looks like I’ve played over 200 games and I have so much of the game that I haven’t even touched yet.

Just to throw a few other options on the pile:

• Valheim is more combat oriented, but is probably my favourite survival crafting game after Subnautica. You’re playing vikings trying to earn their way into Valhalla. I die a lot. Very fun.
• Planet Crafter is more chill, more jank, and more linear, but it’s a survival crafting game that is clearly heavily inspired by Subnautica. You are sent to a mars-like planet to terraform it as part of your prison sentence. It’s a great podcast game, just build and explore and watch numbers go up.
• Less on the survival crafting side of things, the environmental storytelling is also really good in Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn. Very different games, but they were actually what I went to after Subnautica to scratch that itch and it worked weirdly well.

I wouldn’t call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don’t even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won’t vote Conservative, Conservative voters won’t vote NDP.

This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.

Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn’t call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.

Ranked choice is one of the simplest ways to get a more representative, but to the question in the title it does tend to favour centrist parties. Progressives will vote for a centrist over a conservative, and a conservative will vote for a centrist over a progressive, so the centrist party will win almost every time.

It’s still an improvement over the disaster of FPTP because it will at least elect parties that the majority can tolerate, but there is still a bias present.

Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.

The art direction seems kind of off, but sometimes that can shake itself out in game.

The tone of the trailer is definitely not the Dragon Age vibe. Lighthearted Oceans-style crew selection to deal with what looks like some sort of world-ending calamity? Yeah, that’s not right.

Things could work out but I’m sure not feeling optimistic.

My prediction is that people will overhype it with lots of hopes for super complex systems, call it shit when it has fewer mechanics and civs than 3/4/5/6 with all their DLC, and then eventually decide it’s good after a couple years of DLC and patches.

You know, the usual Civ cycle. I’ll probably buy it day 1 assuming it isn’t actually broken, per usual, and dump a couple hundred hours in it, per usual.

On principal I don’t use cloud-based password management solutions like this, but Proton Pass does make it somewhat tempting, especially since I have a Proton Unlimited subscription anyways. KeepassXC + syncthing do well enough, but PAM integration would be kind of nice some days when I’m opening and closing my vault a ton.

Mount and Blade: Warband has multiple incredible total conversions. I’ve dumped a lot of time into Prophecy of Pendor and The Last Days, probably more than the base game.

For actually free games there are so many options that it really comes down to taste. Unciv is a fantastic reimplementation of Civ 5. Super Auto Pets is a fun casual auto battler. HoloCure is a really good Vampire Survivors-style game themed after Hololive vtubers. There are tons of MMOs and shooters that are F2P and good, but I know most of those from hearsay rather than experience.

This is basically it, yes, but sometimes I’m drunk-ordering 40 nuggets and a milkshake and adding the mint myself is enough effort to make me reconsider my reckless disregard for my wellbeing.

Unciv works perfectly fine on a phone if you feel like risking significant amounts of your time (:

This is how I do it. I may never stop actually having that gmail account in use due to the number of accounts tied to it, but I at least can use other services going forward without losing tons of stuff.

Honestly, it’s halfway correct, if I need to go into the office I’d rather be able to interact with people IRL. Most of my work unit tries to be there on Mondays for that reason.

The caveats are that I’d still rather not be there at all and that our office sucks so most people are at least as effective at home anyways.

Nord Light was also pretty good when I tried it. I waffle back and forth between light and dark themes now and then and there’s always a few good options that brighten the space without flashbanging you.

My most direct use of fzf is to search large result sets for something I can’t 100% remember the name or location of, so this actually sounds nice. I’ve managed to get fzf to slow down a few times and… well, I’m sure as hell not organizing that folder structure.

There’s been some controversy around the governance structure and culture with NixOS that has a number of people unhappy. I’m honestly not sure of the details but it’s ptesumably less about the software than the people.

I only played a few hours of Dome Keeper but it was quite a bit of fun. There’s already a fair amount of variety possible in the runs but not so much that this isn’t appreciated.

Considering there seems to be minimal changes to the game and the graphics honestly didn’t need any updates beyond what the GameCube could put out, I am still unreasonably excited for this game. I played the everliving fuck out of TTYD through my teens. Tempted to mess around with a danger Mario build for the first time in more than a decade.

I’m curious to see where they go next. A lot of modern consumer electronics have repairability and upgradeability problems, but I also wouldn’t expect they’d be able to crack into the phone market as easily as the laptop market, so presumably there’s some more niche target they have.

Framework is a private company so they need to agree to be bought. I don’t know enough about the leadership to be able to say the likelihood of accepting an offer, but it’s not just a thing that automatically happens because Dell has a lot of money.